There has long been a need for efficient methods and systems for distribution of differing types of media such as data, images, audio, or video information. In attempting to fulfill this need, a wide variety of types of systems have been developed, from manual systems such as postal and express physical delivery systems to digitized systems such as those built around wide area computing networks (WANs) and the Internet.
Manual systems suffer from a wide variety of problems, such as high cost, limited reach, unreliability, and time delay. The Internet and traditional e-mail types of distribution systems have become a much more omnipresent vehicle for distributing media, but the Internet presents significant problems for those seeking to reliably, efficiently, and quickly distribute digital media, particularly voluminous media files, to a variety of users.
In this regard, the Internet does presently support certain types of ‘push’ distribution and ‘pull’ distribution. Internet facilities such as traditional e-mail allow an Internet user to ‘push’ content out to many other Internet users (but usually not other types of users) through the Internet. Through the web and other facilities, the Internet allows Internet users (again, not others) to log onto web sites and ‘pull’ or download content from the sites. The Internet ‘pull’ model of distribution is unreliable and often quite untimely because it requires the receiving party to have access to the Internet and to initiate on its own the ‘pull’ or media download. Similarly, the Internet ‘push’ model of distribution is either: (i) unreliable and untimely because it does not accomplish any delivery at all until the intended receiving party logs onto the Internet and retrieves the pushed e-mail content from the party's e-mail facility; or (ii) expensive if the ‘push’ model is made more reliable by a permanent connection to the Internet by all desired receiving parties.
Moreover, while the Internet can serve as an effective platform for distribution of relatively small e-mail messages to those who have corporate or educational LANs permanently connected to the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, the Internet is not effective when timing of the reception is important and the sending and receiving entities either do not both have access to the Internet or are not both on-line to send and receive when needed. The Internet also suffers from well known bandwidth and other constraints that make it difficult, and often impossible, to rely on the Internet to distribute large media files, such as those containing images, audio, or video, for use by others who must receive and use such files in a timely fashion.
One approach to solving the problem of distribution of digital media has been to develop private wide area networks (“WANs”) independent of the public Internet. Examples of these types of systems include corporate WAN's and the private WAN audio distribution systems deployed by companies like Digital Courier International and Musicam Express. (See U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,334 and the commonly-assigned co-pending application Ser. No. 08/705,797, filed Aug. 30, 1996, entitled “Audio File Distribution and Production System”). These private WANs often consist of networks of (often specialized) personal computers linked through dedicated, private telecommunications types of links in order to produce and distribute digital information and media from one computer on the network to another.
These types of prior art WAN's have limited reach since they usually are connected only to those users who have systems connected to the WAN. They also typically have required dedicated telecommunications connections for each machine on the WAN in order to assure accessibility of, and push distribution to, each machine on the WAN. They also typically have required use of substantial expensive proprietary or non-standard software systems in order to reliably distribute voluminous media information, particularly audio or video content, throughout the WAN.
In addition, these prior art systems have typically required deployment of many thousands of expensive, customized PC's for use by each receiving or producing entity on the WAN. These types of WANs have thus not only required huge expense and effort required to manufacture, deploy, and install the customized PC's to establish the WAN and to achieve the distribution sought by the WAN, but also inherently limited the ability to easily and economically upgrade the installed base of PC's and other networking equipment over time when hardware upgrading is required or advisable (as it so often is in the rapidly evolving field of personal computers and telecommunications).